They weren’t teaching me anything. If I followed Mom’s example I wouldn’t even know how to use a fork. When she actually bothered to eat, Mom’s food of choice was Bugles right out of the bag. Or if I pushed hard enough, cereal right out of the box.

“But she has fine bone structure. Don’t you think, Nox?” Glamora continued, winking at Nox.

I swallowed a gulp of the wine, which tasted vaguely like flowers. Did Glamora actually just give me a compliment? And what was with the winking?

“Amy has great potential,” Gert jumped in.

Potential was a word that had hovered over my head for the last five or six years at school. Wasted potential. Had it followed me here?

Mombi pressed the subject. “Did she accomplish anything without your aid?”

“No, but she will,” Gert said.

Mombi sighed.

“We don’t have much time.”

“It’s just that for a girl who says so much, she does not yet know herself.”

Ouch. It sounded different when Gert said it just to me instead of saying it in front of everyone else. Plus, they were talking about me as if I weren’t sitting right in front of them.

Nox cleared his throat. Here we go, I thought. Now he has a chance to really lay into my failures.

“You can’t judge her now. She’s doing the best that she can under the circumstances.”

The wineglass slipped in my hand. I caught it, but not before a few drops spilled on the table. Nox glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. Was he seriously defending me?

Glamora erased the spill with a wave of her hand.

I looked up at Nox. It didn’t make any sense. Mombi studied him appraisingly, as if she was just as surprised as me.

“It takes most charges years to learn what we want her to do in a month,” he explained. “She isn’t even from here. What did you expect? No one can do that.” Suddenly I realized why he was being so nice. He genuinely sounded like he couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of me ever being a real witch.

“You did,” Mombi countered.

“I was a kid. It’s easier.”

“Dorothy did,” Glamora added.

“I can speak for myself!” I blurted. “And honestly, what do I really have to know how to do in order to be bait?” I had put it all together in my head. I was now a fugitive from the palace—and one who Dorothy had a very personal interest in. They wanted to use me to distract her. That had to be it.

“I’m right. I’m bait, aren’t I?”

Gert opened her mouth to answer—probably to say something comforting—but she stopped herself. She actually looked surprised, which was a real feat for someone who could read minds. But then I realized she wasn’t looking at me. I swiveled in my chair to follow her gaze and gasped. Standing behind me were two girls, dripping in blood.

They weren’t like any girls I had seen before. The tall one had red hair and a deep purple scar in the center of her forehead, about the size of a silver dollar and as smooth as exposed bone. The other girl had blonde hair and piercing green eyes and a small, heart-shaped mouth. But honestly it was hard to focus on that, because, while half of her face was flesh, like mine, the other half was made out of metal, the two sides bolted together with big, thick screws. Her neck was the same—divided down the center—and her left arm was metal too. I couldn’t see her legs under her pants, but I wondered if her whole body was the same way.

The two girls were leaning against one another. Or rather, the tin girl was leaning into the taller one. I couldn’t see the wounds underneath all the blood, but she looked more hurt.

Mombi was at the girls’ side in a blink. “Where? What?”

“Quadling Country. The Lion,” mumbled the tall girl with the round scar.

Mombi disappeared in a plume of smoke. Instead of helping the bloody girls, it was clear she’d gone to check out the where and the what.

Nox twitched beside me at the word Lion. He leapt to his feet, Gert quick to follow.

Nox picked the tin girl up in his arms. A smile flickered through the woozy pain on her face.

“Melindra, it’s going to be okay. I’ve got you.”

For the first time since I met him, Nox looked like he cared.

Gert’s hand glowed as she touched the girl’s arm. “Let’s get her to the spring.”

Before I knew it, the girls and Nox and Gert were gone. When I turned back to the table, Glamora leaned back in her chair and took another bite of the goo.

Being abandoned with no explanation didn’t bother me. What bothered me, suddenly, surprisingly, was how much more Nox cared about helping this other girl.

“Sit,” Glamora commanded at our next lesson, pointing to her vanity as we entered her cave. I was distracted, still irked by what had happened over dinner the night before. Those girls had shown up covered in blood and I was here to learn how to curtsy? I slouched away from her, knowing how much it would bother her. I didn’t sit. I touched her things instead. The vanity was covered with little glass figurines that looked like maybe they were once part of a really ornate chess set. I rolled a glass queen in my palms and heard a deep exhale from Glamora like she was trying to keep calm. I rolled my eyes, too. It was a small act of protest, but it registered like an earthquake for Glamora.

“Sit,” she ordered again without raising her voice, but she snatched the figurine from my hand and placed it back on the vanity. The other figures moved back into place, too, on their own. I wondered if Glamora’s real gift wasn’t etiquette but some kind of witchy OCD.